Team Northern Pike Snags NVWG Wheelchair Softball Title
First, Joe Wittkamp sparked a mid-game rally with his defensive prowess. Then, in the final inning, he and Andrew Bechtle provided some late-game offensive firepower Saturday night.
They, along with a few others, helped Team Northern Pike finish off a 4-2 comeback victory over Team Sturgeon in the 2025 National Veterans Wheelchair Games (NVWG) wheelchair softball championship game in the Minneapolis Convention Center in Minnesota. The Games, which run through Tuesday, are sponsored by the Department of Veterans Affairs and Paralyzed Veterans of America (PVA).
Team Northern Pike rallied from a 2-0 deficit after three innings, tied the game at 2-2 in the fourth and then scored one run in each of the final two innings to seal a come-from-behind win.
A Navy veteran and PVA Buckeye Chapter member, the 54-year-old Wittkamp went two-for-two with two doubles, was hit by a pitch and scored the seventh-inning insurance run to help Team Northern Pike earn the wheelchair softball title at the 44th NVWG.
“I mean, I’ve been doing this for 37 years or so. It’s kind of routine for me,” Wittkamp. “It’s my normal self.”
After coming on in relief to pitch Team Gumbo to the gold medal in last year’s NVWG gold-medal game in New Orleans, Wittkamp finally got his wish this year — to be back playing in the field.
It helped. With Team Northern Pike leading 3-2 in the top of the fifth, Wittkamp caught a hard-hit line drive by John Papai Jr., in the field for the first out. Then, with runners on first and third bases with one out, he helped turn a double-play from shortstop to second base to first base.
“I think it gives the team energy when they feed off me,” says Wittkamp, who served from 1989 to 1994 in aviation and sustained a level T8 complete spinal cord injury (SCI) Oct. 17, 1993, in a motor vehicle accident in North Carolina.
Team Northern Pike held the lead for another inning before Wittkamp launched a double that hit the tarp fence in centerfield to start the top of the seventh inning. After Anthony Martinez grounded out and advanced Wittkamp to third base, Bechtle hit an RBI groundout to score him and give the team the added run it needed. An Army veteran and PVA Northwest Chapter member, Bechtle served from 2005 to 2014 in masonry and construction before sustaining a T12 complete SCI in a 2013 rollover accident.
He only gets to play wheelchair softball at the Games since there’s no team where he lives in Federal Way, Wash.
“It was good. It was sad that I got out, but at least we got the point to win the game,” Bechtle says.
Team Sturgeon started out hot after Jackie Jones hit an infield single and then wheeled all the way home and beat out a throw to home plate after a throwing error in the bottom of the first inning. Jose Rosen added an RBI groundout, scoring Orlando Perez to make it 2-0 Team Sturgeon in the bottom of the third inning.
Team Northern Pike scored twice in the top of the fourth, though, to tie the game with Paul Mann scoring a run and Martinez recording an RBI single to score Victor Ventura. Then, Ranae Byrd-McMinn added an RBI single in the top of the fifth to score Johnny Banda after he doubled to open the inning for a 3-2 advantage before Bechtle’s RBI groundout in the final inning.
Bowled Over By Bowling
Earlier in the day, Dave Gammell had a blast during his first NVWG.
He was granted a new lease on life nearly three years ago, and is taking advantage of it.
Living on the streets in December 2022, he sustained such bad frostbite in minus-20 degree weather that it led him to have both legs amputated below the knee.
The Navy veteran and St. Cloud, Minn., resident says he wasn’t in the right frame of mind and didn’t want to live.
“But apparently He’s [God’s] not done with my plan down here,” says Gammell, who served as a data processing technician from 1978 to 1983. “So, now I wake up every day to make people laugh and smile.”
It looked like he was going to have a rough start during Saturday’s opening morning bowling session at Bowlero in Brooklyn Park, Minn. The Navy veteran recorded eight straight gutter balls at one point in the first game — until he finally found his groove.
In the second and third games, he recorded a handful of strikes — including one where no one noticed. But he was having so much fun, he just kept laughing.
He’s only bowled nine times in a wheelchair but loved the sport growing up.
“I like it because I used to be good at it. I used to have a 181-[pin per game] average. So, not breaking 100 is pretty heartbreaking when you’re used to having 500 [pins total] every night,” Gammell says.